My iFrame usability-gaffe (dommigheid met iFrames)

A couple of days ago I created a small survey to see what people consider sexism (a hot topic currently in the local press and online). For that purpose I embedded a Google Docs Form in an iFrame in a HTML-page on my own site. While following up on the results as they got posted, I noticed a significant amount of respondents were male and aged below 15. Weird, as I had expected that group to be somewhat absent from the results and as the next age-group, 15-20, was indeed barely present. What the heck was happening? My stupidity, that was what was happening!

When a visitor clicks a link at the bottom of a long page inside an iframe and the target is a shorter page inside the same iframe, then he/she will see a blank page which is … well not very usable, no?

And that was exactly what was happening; after having filled in the first, long page of the Google Docs Form, respondents clicked on “Continue” and -depending on the screen resolution- all they saw was a “Submit”-button and not the questions (age, gender and optional e-mail) before that were hidden from view. How utterly stupid of me, especially as I created a small JavaScript thingie, frameMagic.js, to fix just that problem. I implemented frameMagic.js (and made a small change in there for it to work on iFrames without an id) so the number of male participants aged under 15 should drop considerably as. And I guess I’ll have to do some math to make the results less skewed.